Some people believed that tools had spirits and that if they were not treated well, they would take vengeance on its user; that was why workers talked to their tools every morning before they used them. That was what some people believed in the mythical world. They were not superstitious people from the deep inaccessible mountain valleys but sophisticated tool makers who knew about the world beyond the confines of the cities they resided in. Some tools were animated, with thoughts of their own. Some were intentionally made that way; they were called tools with a living essence or robotic tools that could speak to their user. Tools built without mechanisms were still considered alive because they believed everything had a life force.

It was said there was a chisel that had the power to create incredible wood carvings if the chisel liked the person who handled it. If it didn’t like the worker, it caused accidents that injured or killed that person. Such a tool was kept in a particular place by the city’s authorities, and hundreds of crafters gathered to see which one it had chosen. Once it had chosen the craftsman, it would stay with them for the rest of their lives. There was one point the craftsman wouldn’t be allowed to discard the chisel.

There had been great fear as tools were alive, some were robotic, others created through magic, and the ones with spirits within. The tools that resembled spiders were the most feared because they had independent thoughts; they wished to control the human operators. They were a necessary part of workers’ arsenal of tools to complete the job. The spider tools were used by physicians to assist in surgery, for craftsmen, they helped them create intricate designs on wood, metal, and stone; and for tool makers, they were used to help build other tools. These spider tools came in many forms; some had a central cylindrical body that had many arms with specialized tasks, others with two or three arms, at each end were several tentacles performing like human fingers, and there was the giant spider used as a tractor to remove boulders, parts of mountains, building giant structures. They had intelligence; some workers said that each of the spiders had independent thought. Some became angry, killing workers. It was every morning that workers prayed not to be injured, and they made sure that they became friendly with those machines.

The tools that had spirits within them were perhaps a greater danger or an excellent companion to the operator, depending on what that spirit thought of them. An operator had to have made friends with the tools they used; it was similar to the relationship between people. Tools that wizards had used were unstable; they probably could only have been used by other wizards. There were the jealous craftsmen who died and never wished their tools to be used by others; their spirits had resided in those tools.

Tools were the backbone of the mythical world because they were used to build that world.

Robert J. Matsunaga